The everyday tasks of childrearing become even more stressful when both parents are working. Two-earner families also have higher expenses for items like clothing, transportation, and childcare.
In other words, many families are "middle class" and still don't make enough to get by. And these numbers don't take into account the decline in quality of life that many families have experienced. Americans work more hours than citizens of any Western European country, a burden that keeps them away from their families, friends, and personal activities.
Where has the money gone?
Our total national wealth has continued to grow, even as incomes stagnated for most Americans. Where did the money go? The short answer: to the wealthiest among us.
Economist Emanuel Saez found that the top 1 percent of Americans captured more than half of the total income growth from 1993 to 2014, the last year covered by the Pew report. What's more, the top 0.01 percent -- some 16,500 families -- were capturing more of the nation's income than they had since the run-up to the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.
The top 0.1 percent -- just 160,000 families -- owns as much wealth as 90 percent of the country as a whole, or about 145 million families. Just 536 people had a shared net worth of $2.6 trillion at the end of 2015.
Corporate profits, although they've taken a hit in recent months, have nevertheless grown at a healthy clip while wages lag behind. Those profits have increasingly been used to pay high executive salaries, which has led to an explosion in the gap between CEO salaries and worker pay. (Fortune 500 CEOs earned about 42 times as much on average as the typical worker in 1980. Today they earn 373 times as much.) Profit-taking in the form of dividends has increasingly taken the place of long-term investment in workers and business growth.
Millions of jobs have been sucked out of the US economy by trade deals that let corporations replace American workers with low-paid, often mistreated workers in other parts of the world. Deals like the China/World Trade Association agreement shipped jobs to that nation without leveling the playing field by allowing it to keep manipulating its currency.
Wages and benefits have fallen because American union membership has declined, leaving unions without the leverage they once had to demand better deals for working people. The growth of the banking sector has taken investment away from job-producing segments of the economy. Rampant poverty and economic discrimination against people of color, in addition to being inherently evil, has robbed their economy of their productive potential.
Who's behind it?
That's the "what" in the question, "what's killing the American middle class"? But the question remains, who's doing it? The answer to that question includes corporate executives who bend the rules, and Wall Street bankers who break the rules; their lobbyists, who work to change the rules; and the politicians who change in their favor -- in state houses, the halls of Congress, and in the executive and judicial branches.
Virtually all Republicans fit this description. Sadly, so do many Democrats. The rule bending takes the form of deregulation, a tolerance for ever-larger corporate mergers, an unwillingness to enforce the law against bankers, and a plethora of tax breaks for corporations and wealthy individuals. Then there are those terrible trade deals, the defunding of public institutions, the neglect of our infrastructure, and laws that make it harder for workers to collectively bargain on their own behalf.
What do we need a middle class for, anyway?
Why do we care about protecting the middle class? First and foremost, it's a simple matter of fairness. Our national wealth, along with our democracy, has been hijacked by a small number of privileged people. That's wrong.
We want to eliminate poverty, not allow more people to fall into it. And everybody can't be wealthy (no matter what illusions are maintained in the popular media). A robust middle class is the ladder that leads out of poverty.
Middle-class Americans are the economy's largest group of consumers, which makes them engines of economic growth.
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